Ed Burns talks about his Irish American roots with 'The Fitzgerald Family Christmas' - VIDEO

Cahir O'Doherty sits down with actor Ed Burns

People don’t just recommend that you watch an Ed Burns film; they seize you by the arm and just insist. It’s because they feel a deep personal connection to the kind of stories he writes. They get him and he gets them.

From the beginning of his career Burns has explored the Irish American experience in a way that few other writers and directors ever have.

Now fans of his work have reason to celebrate this holiday season. Apart from a cast reunion of sorts going on in The Fitzgerald Family Christmas, Burns is also making his cinematic return after two decades to the Irish American landscape that first made his career.

Back again are Michael McGlone and Connie Britton, who originally starred in The Brothers McMullen, but this time they appear as new characters from the kind of Irish background both they and Burns know like the back of their hands.

It all plays out with a certain inevitability while watching the film, which opens on November 20, but Burns insists it’s a happy accident.

“It evolved as I was writing the script,” Burns, 44, tells the Irish Voice. “I had a conversation with Mike and Connie a few months prior to writing the screenplay about the possibility of a McMullen sequel. I wanted to get their thoughts on where they thought their characters might be 20 years from when we left off.”

Then Burns started to think about other actors he’s worked with successfully, and he started to write parts for them.

“I had just worked with Caitlin Fitzgerald and Kerry Bishe in Newlyweds and I knew that I wanted them to play two of the younger sisters,” he reveals.

Once he had his four principals written and cast, he realized the film was about a family coming together for a reunion.

“And I decided to do the same with my own filmmaking family. I went through the casts of every film I have ever made and cast at least one actor from every film I have made,” Burns said.

“The great thing that happened was that so many of these actors had known each other for such a long time, so the minute we started rolling the cameras you had a sense that these people really did have a shared history, which is actually true. You really buy these guys as siblings.”

Tyler Perry, the hugely successful one man production company behind the Medea film series, was the figure who suggested that Burns return to what he knows best, his Irish American background. (Burns recently co-starred in Perry’s latest film Alex Cross).

“I don’t have any other explanation for why I haven’t tackled Irish America as a subject since The Brothers McMullen other than that I have been exploring other subjects and different parts of my life,” Burns confesses. (Married to one of the most beautiful women in the world, supermodel Christy Turlington and living with her and their two children in the millionaire heavy Tribeca neighborhood in Manhattan now, you can forgive him if the goings on in Long Beach aren’t always at the forefront of his mind).

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Nster.com